“Are you all right, man?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I finished up three days of per diem for Reliable yesterday. Then I spent this afternoon comforting a widow.”
“Oh?”
“Or she comforted me. Right now it seems cold comfort all around.”
He waited.
“A former client,” I said finally. “You remember the fel-low who was shot on Eleventh Avenue.”
“I do. I thought you were done with that.”
“I don’t seem to be done with his wife.”
“Ah.”
Someone tried the door. It was locked and gated, but the one light burning and ourselves at a table was enough to kin-dle hope in the breast of some poor drunk every now and then. Mick stood, walked halfway to the door, and motioned for the fellow to go away. He tried the knob one more time before he gave up and moved on.
Mick sat down again and filled his glass. “He came in here a time or two,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“Holtzmann?”
“Himself. This past summer we got our share of them that don’t belong here. Part of it’s the neighborhood changing, and then there was that fucking newspaper article.”
Newsday had run a column on Grogan’s, an affectionately Runyonesque report on the raffish crowd, with special em-phasis on the legends surrounding Mick himself. I said, “That drew people? You’d have thought it would have scared them away.”
“You would,” he said, “but humans are a strange race of men. Your man came in around that time, looking around the way they’ll do. As if he might spy a corpse in the corner.”
“He was an informer,” I said.
“Oh?”
“He sold out an uncle to the IRS, then set up another lawyer for a drug bust.”
“By God,” he said.
“He did pretty well at it. But it may have been what got him killed.”
“It wasn’t the other lad? Your man in the army jacket?”
“Well, it might have been. There’s no telling.”
“No telling,” he said reflectively. “And if it wasn’t the bum? Who then?”
“Someone he was setting up.”
“Was he a blackmailer, then?”
“No, not unless he decided to branch out.”
He frowned. “Then who’d know to kill him? The uncle? The lawyer?”
“It doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Not a case in progress, I shouldn’t think, or ye’d have seen federal agents buzzing round like blowflies in carrion. Someone he was setting up, you said. And hadn’t yet gone to the DEA or the IRS or whatever collection of initials he was planning to run to.”
“Right.”
“So how would your man know to kill him? And why kill him? Why not warn him off? What do you think he’d do if someone had a word with him?”
“Run like a rabbit.”
“I’d say the same. Ye wouldn’t even have to raise your hand to the man. If it had been me, I’d never have raised my voice. I’d have lowered it, I’d have spoken very softly.”
“And carried a big stick?”
“You wouldn’t need the stick for that lad.”
“Maybe it was someone from the past,” I said. “Not the uncle or the lawyer but someone from another job he did, one I don’t know about. Someone who had a score to settle with Holtzmann.”
“And found him on Eleventh Avenue? Was he to be found there often? Is that where a man would go looking for him?”
“Someone could have followed him there.”
“And shot him down when he reached for the telephone?” He picked up his glass. “Ah, Jesus, who am I to tell you your business?”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” I said.
We talked of other things and let the silence stretch out between our stories. He wasn’t hitting the Jameson bottle very hard, just topping up his glass often enough to keep from losing that edge. It was maintenance drinking, and I re-membered it well; I had done my own share of it, until life took me to a point where maintaining was no longer possible because the traitorous booze would get me drunk before it would let me get comfortable.
Something was playing hide-and-seek in my memory, something I’d heard or read in the past day or two. But I couldn’t quite manage to grab on to it. . . .
The days are short that time of year, but eventually the sky outside turned light. Mick went behind the bar and started a pot of coffee brewing. He filled two mugs and sweetened his with whiskey, and I’d hate to guess how many times I had mixed the two. The perfect combination—caffeine to en-liven the mind, alcohol to silence the soul.
We drank our coffee. He looked at his watch, checked the time against the clock over the back bar. “Time for mass,” he announced. “Will you come?”
The priest was Irish born, almost young enough to be an al-tar boy. There were only a dozen or so in the congregation, most of them nuns, and no one but Mick robed in butcher’s white. I think the two of us were the only ones who didn’t take communion.
He’d parked the silver Cadillac in front of the funeral par-lor next door to the church. We got in and he put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the car right away. He said, “Are ye all right, man?”
“I think so.”
“How is it with you and herself?”
He meant Elaine. “It’s a little strained,” I said.
“Does she know about the other one?”